… which you probably do. But defining an academy, structuring skills development by role and getting it into the field is a different job from building the next module, and it needs somebody watching the whole picture.
Here is the pattern. Somebody decides the account managers need developing, so an account management programme gets built, a methodology gets bought, or an essential skills curriculum goes into the platform. Competently delivered, mostly good content from good providers.
And almost none of it tied to the operating model designed six months earlier. Not to the role hierarchy, not to the job architecture, not to the actual expectations placed on that seat. So it becomes a library. Sellers attend, recognise most of it in different words, conclude they already knew it, and go back to their desks unchanged.
The people building it are good at their craft but were never in the room when the operating model was designed. That is structural rather than personal, and it is why the academy ends up answering a question nobody asked, reinforcing what people already knew or it comes in too late.
The ground has moved underneath it too. Classroom became digital, digital became AI, and how people consume, retain and retrieve knowledge has changed completely. That changes what you build, and how you distribute it and resurface it in the flow of the work.
An academy is not a content problem. It is an architecture problem.
A capability system, not a course catalogue.
We architect the academy. What capability each role genuinely needs, at what level, in what order, and how people will actually absorb it. Then what you build, what you buy, and what quietly gets retired.
Three levels, built in sequence. Foundations so somebody can do the job at all. Skills by role so they get good at it. And a leadership academy, because every manager you develop multiplies across their team.
Delivered through our partner network where content is better bought than built, and anchored in your strategy, your operating model and your process throughout.
Not a online course platform, not a curriculum, and not a training provider we happen to resell. The full learning architecture, and then whatever fills it.
of enablement teams plan against the sales strategy. The rest are building against something else.
of sales leaders have ever been trained as coaches. Expected to develop people using a skill nobody taught them.
of training is forgotten within a week without reinforcement. One session changes nothing, however good it was.
quota attainment where enablement runs to a formal charter, against a 57.7% average.
Sources: Gartner, sales enablement charter and planning research. Gartner and LinkedIn Learning, manager coaching data. Ebbinghaus retention research applied to corporate learning. CSO Insights Sales Enablement Study.
Architecture first. Content second.
A sales academy is built in six stages: read the operating model, define the capability each role requires, audit what already exists, decide what to build and what to buy, design how it will be delivered, then embed and reinforce it.
We start where the job architecture sits. Role hierarchies, job profiles, spans and the expectations placed on each seat, because capability requirements derive from those and nowhere else. An account manager, a presales engineer and a solution specialist need different depth in different places, and working that out means understanding how the operating model actually clicks together.
From there it is three levels in sequence. Foundations, so a person can do the job at all. Skills by role, so they get good at it. A leadership academy, because every manager you develop multiplies across their team. Built in that order, because the second never holds without the first.
Then the part most academies treat as an afterthought. How people actually take it in now, how it is distributed, and how it resurfaces in the flow of the work at the moment somebody needs it.
Three things most academies miss
The ground underneath this has moved completely.
Classroom became digital, digital became AI, and how people consume, retain and retrieve knowledge changed with it. Gartner expects sellers to spend 65% fewer hours in formal training by 2026 than in 2022. An academy designed for the old consumption model is already obsolete.
It sits closer to the sales process than to the LMS.
Foundations is largely a process, systems and commercial model question. Which is why an academy built in isolation from the revenue infrastructure teaches people a job that does not match the one they go back to.
Behaviour does not change on one exposure.
It changes on several, in several formats, reinforced by a manager who knows what they are reinforcing. Design for that from the start, or accept that you are producing attendance data.
Three levels. Built in order.
Each level rests on the one below it. Skip the base and everything above becomes training people quietly work around. This is the shape we build to, whatever the business and whatever already exists.
Each tier is wider because the population is. Foundations reaches everybody. Very few academies build it properly, and every level above inherits the gap.
And we work across all three, end to end. Most providers cover one tier and one activity. That is the difference.
Our goal is to create sales academies that actual work. not ones that are seen as an overhead, not the first thing to be cut when budgets are tight, or one that sellers claim did not help them.
So to make sure it works, we also coach the person carrying the academy too. Usually the one doing it without anybody in their corner, never coached or helped… we have something for you.
03
Managers coached to coach, reinforce, drive the rhythm and build momentum. Leaders enabled to carry change, culture and rhythm, as ‘drivers’ of growth.
02
The competency model and the programmes behind it. Prospecting, discovery, value selling, negotiation, account management, executive conversations and so much more.
01
What this job, in this business, actually requires. Onboarding, what you sell and why people buy it, the process, systems and commercial models used daily, and where the role sits in the ecosystem. Depth varies by persona.
Five stages, and then it starts again.
01
Assess
Audit what exists. Survey the salesforce, assess capability against the framework, benchmark by role and level.
02
Architect
Design it against the go-to-market strategy, the portfolio and the job architecture. Three levels, with the journeys between them.
03
Align and launch
Leadership endorsing it visibly. Brand and identity by audience. Launched properly rather than announced.
04
Execute
Programmes run. Some by us, some by partners, some by your team with us alongside. Leaders coached through it.
05
Reinforce
Certification against capability, manager rhythm, resurfacing in the workflow. Then back to the start.
And then it runs again
An academy is not a project that finishes, it is a cycle that keeps pace with the business. The organisations that treat it as a one-off are the ones rebuilding it from scratch three years later.
Built into your tooling, properly
Structured in your LMS or enablement platform, tagged so people can find it, mapped to the learning journeys and reportable. An academy nobody can navigate is an academy nobody uses.
Want to know what is in our curriculum?
The full programme list, by level and by role. Happy to walk you through it.
A structure your team can run to truly enable selling
The anchor
We align your sales job architecture, role expectations and core capabilities into a single view of your commercial and sales academy, aligning strategy to execution using our skills assessment models and learning capability maps. .
Capability assessment
A structured skills gap analysis across the commercial organisation. What people can actually do, evidenced, not what the last engagement survey said they felt confident about.
The competency framework
A skills wheel built for your commercial model, with proficiency levels defined per competency so foundational, practitioner and expert mean something specific rather than something aspirational.
Persona and level mapping
Every seat mapped against the wheel. Account manager, new business, presales, solution specialist, inside sales, partner, first line manager, second line and above. Each with its own required proficiency by competency.
Learning journeys
The pathway from where a persona starts to where the role requires them to be. Sequenced, with prerequisites, so development is a route rather than a catalogue somebody browses.
And the investment case underneath it
The cost of closing each gap, set against the cost of leaving it open. Ramp time, attainment differential by proficiency band, attrition, and the productivity cost of a capability gap nobody priced.
Foundations, skills by role and the leadership layer. Sequenced so the second level lands on a first level that actually exists, and built against the capability map rather than against a wishlist.
Which providers fit which gap, and what you should build yourself. Then the format decision for each: live and in person, virtual, digital, AI-supported practice. How it is branded, how it is launched, and how it gets reinforced afterwards.
Reinforcement built into the rhythm they already run, so the academy does not depend on a central team chasing completion. The difference between a programme and a capability.
Certification against what people can do rather than what they attended, and measures agreed before anything is built. Completion rates are not evidence.
The COMPOSE Sales Model® covers a commercial function across six pillars: culture, operating model, people, operations, strategy and experience. An academy anchors on two of them and quietly underpins three more, which is why it fails so often when it is built as a standalone training function.
Anchored here
What every seat is capable of, and how that capability is built. Not headcount, not structure. What the person in the role can actually do, assessed against a standard and developed on purpose rather than by accident.
Anchored here
Because capability requirements come from where the business is going, not from a training catalogue. Change the segments, the propositions or the routes to market, and the academy has to change with them or it starts teaching last year’s job.
And it underpins
Operating model
A role design only means something once the people in it have been built to meet it. Otherwise it is an org chart with job titles on it.
Experience
What a buyer gets is decided by what the seller in front of them is capable of. The customer experience is downstream of capability.
Culture
A business that develops its people deliberately tells them something about how it sees them. So does one that does not.
Go-to-market strategy
Explore go-to-market strategy ›Plays and pipeline
Explore plays and pipeline ›Process and platforms
Explore process and platforms ›
An academy is the mechanism that turns a strategy into something the people carrying it are actually equipped to do.
Every commercial plan assumes a level of capability. Almost none of them state what it is, and fewer still check whether it exists before the year starts.
What I have watched happen instead is this. Somebody decides the account managers need developing. An account management programme gets built, or a methodology gets bought from a provider who is genuinely excellent at what they do. It goes into the platform. And structurally it is still just content, because nobody connected it to the operating model, the role hierarchy or the job architecture that was designed. Moreover, it has almost no link to operational execution and cadence day-in-day out, so it never gets reinforced, embedded and made part of the culture.
So sellers turn up, hear things they half recognise in slightly different words, and quietly conclude they already knew it. It becomes a nice day out or a quick click through an online programme straight to the questions and nothing changes.
Build it from the job people are actually being asked to do, sequence it properly, and deliver it the way people consume information now. Then it works.
Umar Gill, F.ISP
Managing Partner, Compose Sales Partners
PACE is our framework for commercial capability, built across four pillars:. he academy is the second of the four. PACE is one framework rather than four services because they are truly connected. Plays without capability are a message nobody can carry. Capability without content leaves sellers building their own material. Content without engagement sits in a library. And engagement without the other three fails to land in the field.
P
The content and execution engine for growth. What sellers say, and where the pipeline comes from.
A
The learning ecosystem. Foundations, skills by role and leadership, built from the operating model rather than from a curriculum.
It is the layer everything else assumes and almost nobody builds properly.
You are here
C
What the buyer sees and what the seller uses, governed and tiered rather than accumulated. With the decay management most libraries never get.
E
The rhythm, the communications, the events and the manager cadence that keep all of it alive past launch.
It starts with a conversation about where your pipeline actually leaks, and a clear view of what we would do about it.
A practitioner-led sales transformation practice anchored on the COMPOSE Sales Model®.
Copyright © Compose Sales Partners™ Limited. COMPOSE Sales Partners™, the Compose Sales Partners™ logos, COMPOSE Sales Model® and COMPOSE Sales Kick-Off Model™ are trademarks and service marks of COMPOSE Sales Partners™ Limited. PERFORM, PACE, and RISE are proprietary frameworks of COMPOSE Sales Partners™. Other brands and product names are the trademarks of their respective companies.
